


Sing the Monster to Sleep (working title)

by aprettygoodboy



Category: Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Gen, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 21:13:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18322136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aprettygoodboy/pseuds/aprettygoodboy
Summary: Some twenty years after Clarice Starling's disappearance and presumed murder, Ardelia Mapp attends the funeral of the former FBI deputy director who was killed in what is believed to be a terrorist attack at a DC museum. At the cemetery she sees a man attending a separate graveside service and too late realizes she's laid eyes on the monster responsible for Starling's death. To hunt him down she must recruit a dying Will Graham, whose broken mind holds the pieces of the ultimate trap for the ultimate monster, Dr Hannibal Lecter, who with the loss of his only anchor to humanity has become the perfect apex predator.





	Sing the Monster to Sleep (working title)

**Author's Note:**

> hey all. this is my first ever fanfic and my first time on ao3. so if I screw up using tags or misuse some site feature don't worry! it's only my basic incompetence.
> 
> I've had this story kicking around in my head since I first read Hannibal. I tried to do an homage to Thomas Harris's prose style, which is a huge part of the stories for me. I really hope you enjoy it.

**Chapter 1: A Funeral Scene**

The soft midday shadows of the Stonewall Gardens cemetery lie doubled on the close cropped grass as if somewhere above the low clouds twin suns hang on opposite sides of the Virginia sky. A gentle rain hushes against the monuments and mourners alike, washing away granite dust and mingling with tears.

Today is a busy day for the sextons here at Stonewall: four concurrent graveside services is far out of the common. The crew sit on their lunch buckets on the far side of a knoll, men and equipment alike hidden from the attendees by a disused mausoleum atop the man-made slope. The foreman is smoking a cigarette and furtively blowing the smoke down and away from the low rise.

“Get some overtime today, boys,” he says.

“Oh hell,” says another. “You might. Rest of us'll be cut before evening. Guarantee it.”

The foreman shakes his head. “Naw, I cleared it with the office. They want to look good for the feebs, hope to get some return business.”

“The feds are here?”

“Mhmm. The service over in P1, that's a old FBI agent. Name of Pearson.”

“Pearson?” Another asks. “You don't mean Pearsall do you?”

The foreman squints at the man and nods. “That's the one. You look at the work order?”

“Naw, just remembered the name from the news. He was one of them killed last week at the museum. Said he was some kind of top dog, been a fed for thirty some-odd years, it said.”

Another man shakes his head. “I wonder why they're plantin’ him here. Federales have got their own cemetery.”

The foreman carefully stubs his cigarette against his bootheel and pockets the butt. He says, “Could be a family plot. There's an almighty big bunch at his service. Hell of a lot more than that sorry affair over in A1.”

*******

Ardelia Mapp was searching for the hazard flashers in her rental car, cursing under her breath the car, the weather, and the bumper to bumper traffic leading out from Clint Pearsall's funeral, all with more or less equal venom. She hadn't wanted to come. She wasn't FBI and had not personally known Pearsall but her somewhat regular boyfriend was a former liaison between Homeland Security and the FBI, reporting directly to Deputy Director Pearsall. Mapp found herself unable to invent a convincing excuse to miss the service but at least had the foresight to insist on driving herself. Federal memorial services could last well into the small hours and could consume hard liquor at the pace and volume of an Irish wake.

“Got damn car,” she said, her icy lawyer's diction slipping into patois as her frustration mounted. “There is no need for you to have all these got damn buttons. You are not a space shuttle, you ain't anything but a rinky dink Hyundai that can't hit the speed limit downhill with the wind behind you.”

She jumped back as the radio blared to life at the push of a button on the steering wheel. She succeeded at last at making it turn off again and leaned back with her eyes closed.

“Sumbitch,” she said. She breathed out slowly through her nose and began to laugh.

It had been years since she and Clarice Starling had sat down with a bottle of Jack Daniel's and cussed their way through some difficult or frightening circumstance. It was their way of whistling past the graveyard, knocking the malign fairies out of wood. Even now she could hear Clarice slipping back into that blackstrap drawl, giving the business to some “got damn sumbitch” coursework or “ass backwards fuckin’” trainee. She could remember the ever-present knots in Starling's jaw relaxing as she and Jack D exorcised her numerous demons. 

A lengthy honk roused her from her reverie and Mapp came back to herself. At last the line of cars had begun to move at a geological pace. Muttering, giving up the hazards as a lost cause, Mapp dropped the car into gear and crept along at idle speed. Whole minutes passed as she inched forward, the rental's little engine all but drowned out by the delicate susurrus of the autumn drizzle as she ascended the alphabet of cemetery plots. As she passed from N to M her mind drifted back to Clarice, as it had for years after Starling's disappearance some twenty years ago.

Officially still missing but universally presumed dead, her last known location the forest enclave of a meat baron's scion where she'd gone to save a monster from the vengeance of his own victim, Clarice had vanished from the Earth and left behind naught but a spoor of maddening clues: the last known image of the suspended FBI agent a set of grainy stills from a Safeway security camera; the last witness to see her alive a DC patrolwoman so unhelpful in FBI interviews that Mapp tore up her copy of the transcript and had to bite her lip until she drew blood. And the last associate of Starling's to speak with her none other than the late Deputy Director Clint Pearsall, then a lowly special agent in charge.

Mapp brought the car to a stop as she neared the entrance to the cemetery, somewhere in the A section she estimated. A deep ache in her wrists let her know she'd been gripping the steering wheel as if to strangle it and she let go in painful increments. Other mourners from some other funeral stood alongside the gracefully curved asphalt drive, most crouched into their collars beneath umbrellas and peering out like suspicious owls.

Some small distance back from the drive, next to an open plot with a peculiar black marble monument, another man stood with his hat in hand next to a dour minister shielding his bible from the rain. The man was slight and shorter than the minister but with a regal air to his bearing which gave the illusion of considerable size; with his silver hair slicked straight back and his fine features above a beautiful wool overcoat Mapp thought he too was a minister of some sort. Though the rain had begun to fall in earnest the man stood with an unnatural stillness such that the drops seemed simply to pass through him to the ground; or perhaps he held himself aloof from man and nature alike, allowing no affinity with either kingdom. It was this sense of fixity more than anything else which set to ringing some faint but familiar alarm bell in Mapp's mind, but then the horns were sounding again and she had to move along.

Mapp was perhaps an hour down the turnpike when the truth of what she had seen slammed into her with the force of a slap and she had to pull over to the shoulder to save herself from losing control at eighty miles per hour.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Oh sweet Jesus that was Lecter.”


End file.
